According to recent opinion polls, Americans are very unhappy with universities. But a primary cause of that discontent is the very reason we measure popular opinion about them: The democratic ideal enjoys sweeping influence over all our institutions, not only its rightful domain over the explicitly political. Alexis de Tocqueville warned that such was the power of democracy in America that it would transform society in its image, even those arrangements better structured according to different ideals.

　　Increasing democratization has changed the American university in two ways. First, universities are no longer institutions focused on advancing their traditional mission, be it the transmission of knowledge or the sorting of students by merit. Instead, they have also become places that mediate between the preferences of different constituencies, such as students, faculty, and donors. They have been remade in democracy’s pluralist model.

　　Second, universities reflect ideological sensibilities naturally allied with democracy—an enthusiasm for equality and a lack of deference to authority—even when these sensibilities conflict with their traditional purposes. In universities, just as in the wider world, for instance, the left expands the scope of the equality principle to the detriment of other important principles, like freedom and merit. Indeed, equality can metastasize therewith less resistance, because there are no actual elections through which the ordinary public can register their discontent. As a result, it is even more difficult at universities than in society at large to prevent groups from using the democratic slogan of equality to pursue the ends of ideological control.

　　Moreover, the university has also witnessed the disappearance of deference—the notion that students, because of their relative ignorance, should be reticent about loudly proclaiming every idea they have about the world and about how the university should advance it. Youthful enthusiasm cannot be easily contained in today’s university setting.

　　The Appearance of the Classically Liberal University

　　In the West, religious authorities originally founded universities. They taught theology and were generally run by clerics. But that did not mean they were exclusively religious institutions. Many also received secular charters and taught secular subjects such as the traditional classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. As a result, outside of theology, academics and students enjoyed substantial freedom of inquiry. And, significantly, they faced little pressure from democratic norms. A world dominated by hierarchy and deference, not authenticity and equality, assured a space for the university to operate autonomously from much of the rest of society.

　　To be sure, the medieval world was also more authoritarian than ours, and religious and secular powers sometimes circumscribed inquiry and research. But as religious authorities lost secular power and the centers of political power shifted, these constraints fell away. With the rise of the idea of the research university in Germany, came a more clearly articulated principle of academic freedom. Thus, the ideal of the modern university in the West emerged alongside classical liberal ideas. That ideal focused on inquiry and knowledge creation and transmission. Universities in the young United States reflected these changes. While many of the oldest American institutions of higher education had begun in the colonial era with religious missions, the supports or constraints (depending on your viewpoint) of religious orthodoxy became increasingly irrelevant to the universities’ operation.

　　Democratic Transformation

　　The democratic transformation of the university in the United States reverberates through our history. The tumultuous protests of the 1960s against the Vietnam War and other matters reflected the conviction that universities must be socially relevant by listening to and representing the views of their denizens. The more recent demand for diversity of the student body and faculty embodied a claim that the university’s faculty and student body should in fact look like the polity.

　　But these discrete events are manifestations rather than the ultimate drivers of the universities’ democratization. The problem goes deep: American democracy’s foundational principle of equality cannot be easily limited to voting but invades other spheres of society. People radically committed to equality will never show deference to established authorities.

　　When democracy overflows its proper banks, it can do real damage to other social institutions that operate best on other more hierarchical and less egalitarian principles.

　　Many of the problems facing the modern university flow from this all-consuming power of democratic sentiment. Radical students and faculty, along with their allies in administration, will push universities for institutional statements about political issues because they believe their institutions should democratically represent their voices. But taking sides in heated disputes can chill speech, deter debate, and distort the universities’ responsibility to seek truth above all else. Student protests offer another manifestation of this democratic impulse. If universities are democratic institutions, they become part of the public square where demonstrations seek to put pressure on public policy. Seen in this light, the move from academic freedom to the First Amendment as the governing principle for expression at the university was predictable. Academic freedom sought to carve out space for inquiry free from censorship. It is not easily connected to demonstrations, which are about politics rather than inquiry, about force rather than reason. Academic freedom should protect writing and speaking about foreign policy conflicts, but it is not connected to encampments designed to compel a university to take sides in these conflicts. These encampments do not offer reasons, only the flexing of power. Indeed, by blocking free movement, such protests undermine inquiry on campus. Free speech, in contrast to academic freedom, encompasses the right to demonstrate and reflects the view that the university has become a democratic institution.

　　That is not to say that free speech may not be the best principle for universities, once they have accepted their democratic transformation. The First Amendment’s requirements for public neutrality on important questions may prevent the university from cracking down on politically-disfavored demonstrations and not others. And an important set of legal principles has grown up around free speech jurisprudence—time, place, and manner restrictions—that, if enforced, can reliably prevent demonstrations that make it harder for the university to conduct its core business. But free speech remains the second-best principle for university governance because it equally protects reasoned and unreasoned speech. The failure to make such a distinction does not comport with a university’s preserve as a temple of reason apart from the hurly-burly of politics.

　　The ever-expanding administrative bureaucracies on campus are another consequence of the democratization of our universities. Like modern democracies, universities seem to need bureaucracies to make policy around complex issues, particularly when they must balance many different objectives. Faculties are inadequate for the task because it is only one constituency among many and is even more incapable than modern legislators of uniting to provide quick resolutions of crises, including the kind demonstrations cause. Democratizing campus inevitably empowers bureaucrats to administrate policy on behalf of the supposed “common good.”

　　The egalitarian principles of democracy explain why the worst of these bureaucracies has come to center around diversity, equity, and inclusion. One could certainly defend the older sense of these ideals, but the left constantly finds ways to distort and weaponize them. DEI is the newest shibboleth of far-left, egalitarian ideology—and as such, exerts immense power through campus administrators. 

　　The outside regulation of the university through the many federal and state legal requirements also necessitates a large bureaucracy. The faculty could not be easily tasked with compliance. They need specialized help. Thus, not only does the modern university reflect democratic sensibilities, but it also mirrors much of the bureaucratic form of modern democratic government.

　　The bureaucratic turn in university governance has a profound effect on their leadership. No longer are university presidents or deans predominantly distinguished faculty members who take a turn at administration yet retain their fundamental identity as scholars. Now university administration is a track—a kind of cursus dishonoris—wherein faculty members (often of no great distinction) rise ever higher in the ranks and the university pecking order. They are no longer embodiments of the university’s ideal mission of teaching and research. They are instead a kind of politician expert in reconciling conflicting constituencies.

　　All these developments then combine to make universities arenas for political contests rather than liberal learning. If demonstrations on campus seek to make political points, it is hardly a surprise that university presidents will be called before congressional committees and harangued. By trying to influence the world of politics by exerting moral pressure, democratized universities have handed partisan politicians all the tools they need to make them issues on the campaign trail.

　　The Democratic Ideal vs. The University Ideal

　　Even if the democratic transformation explains modern university practices, it does not justify them. The traditional ideals of the university sit uneasily with democracy. Truth in any discipline cannot be decided by majority vote. Free inquiry always has the potential to offend. Those best at inquiry and discovery are necessarily an elite group, whose tastes and ideas may differ from most citizens. And there can be no guarantee that professors, if chosen on merit, will track the proportion of ethnic and racial groups in the population.

　　Democracy performs an essential role in constraining rulers and helping to determine what public goods society needs. But when it overflows its proper banks, it can do real damage to social institutions that operate best on other more hierarchical and less egalitarian principles. In few places has the damage been greater than to universities. And whatever reforms come out of the latest series of imbroglios, it is very unlikely that anything will arrest their transmutation into bureaucratic micro-polities that consistently fall short of their high ideals.